In vehicles having no engines or vehicles whose engines are occasionally out of operation during traveling, such as electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles that have recently been developed, electric compressors are used for refrigerant compression in air conditioners of the vehicles.
On electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles, high-voltage batteries for traveling driving are mounted, and in order to maintain the temperature of the on-vehicle batteries at an appropriate temperature, there have been proposed vehicles having such a configuration that uses air conditioners of the vehicles to control the temperature of on-vehicle batteries.
Such a vehicle is configured to include an evaporator for cooling an on-vehicle battery together with an evaporator for cooling an vehicle interior in a refrigerant circulation passage, for example, and a compressed refrigerant is supplied to both the evaporator for vehicle-interior cooling and the evaporator for on-vehicle battery cooling by using the same compressor.
The described above technique of using part of a heat medium used for an air conditioner for a vehicle interior to control the temperature of equipment mounted on the vehicle is well known as a conventional art. For example, Patent Document 1 discloses that cooling water of an engine is used for a vehicle-interior heating apparatus, and part of this cooling water is used to be heat-exchanged with a gear box so as to control the temperature of the gear box.